“I also worked with the neighbors and the city,” says Lavenson, who was all too aware of Piedmont’s notoriously tough planning commission. “It can be a really drawn out process.” The project’s focus was on the top floor, which is visible from the street; changing that floor would result in changing the style of the whole house. The couple, who were empty nesters, wanted to move their master suite upstairs and live primarily on the top floor. “He’d already done some work on those so we just treated them as a neutral block.” Work had also been done on the courtyard and a view deck in the back, so it was clear that anything Lavenson created would need to dovetail with the existing structure.